Big incentives to explore energy alternatives

The Government is offering fiscal incentives to individuals and businesses to develop alternative renewable sources of energy, Minister of Energy and Energy Affairs Carolyn Seepersad-Bachan said on Monday.

Seepersad-Bachan said, too, that a location for a wind energy farm has been identified but she did not name the location.

Responding to questions on alternative renewable energy for Trinidad and Tobago at the 11th Caribbean Energy Conference at the Hilton Trinidad, Seepersad-Bachan said the country needs to find alternative renewable energy sources due to diminishing oil reserves and production dropping by 45,000 barrels a day over the past five years.

She said that the 2010 Global Renewable Energy Status Report highlighted how 100 countries were implementing policies and programmes on renewable energy but Trinidad and Tobago was “nowhere in this report”.

The Government, she said, has move to place this country in the report for 2011 through fiscal measures taken in this year’s national budget through capital subsidies, grants, investments and other tax credits, sales taxes, energy taxes and value added taxes (VAT) reduction for the promotion of renewable energy.

Throughout this fiscal year, she said, other incentives such as feed-in tariffs to encourage the adoption of renewable energy and a renewable portfolio standard (RPS)—regulation that requires increased energy from renewable sources, are being considered.

The measures being put in place, she said, “would facilitate the development of the home energy self-sufficiency programme in which individual households will be allowed to invest in small-scale wind turbines and photovoltaic (PV) systems, thus generating their own renewable energy to store power on the grid in times of surplus production and to take from the grid in times of need”.

“This we intend to implement over the next 12 months in collaboration with the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) and the Ministry of Public Utilities as a pilot project in the first instance,” she said adding that in the 2011/2012 fiscal year the government would institute incentives to promote renewable energy at the individual and commercial levels.